Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (51 page)

So that's what happened, windows everywhere with a dozen different views – Venice in a storm, an apple orchard, space and Earth seen from the window of a rocket parked on the moon, a smoky Victorian pea-soup vision of London, a fantastical sort of Emerald City. He was showing off, really. There 409

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was nothing in the world he was any good at except blowjobs and painting, he knew that, he'd even been
told
that, so he was fucking well going to impress Lindsay with both, he decided fiercely, sketching the outline of his final window, the slanted slit through a thick stone castle wall and the advancing army in the distance.

It all looks a bit tired now, a few years later. He wonders if Lindsay would buy him more paints if he asked, if he's going to be locked up in here again like Rapunzel, and he fades into sleep thinking about a new window he'll paint when the walls are blank again, a stone tower with a slate roof and a window just below the eaves and a long, golden plait hanging down to the carpet, swaying in the nonexistent breeze.

***

Of course he's not allowed to Ty's funeral, but they don't tell Ellie why.

Lindsay just hands him the phone and tells him he's got to offer to babysit the girls, so that's what he does. They come over because their own house is going to be full of people dressed in black making awkward smalltalk and their mother doesn't want them there for that – not even Melissa, and she's nearly twelve. Old enough for it, Pip thinks. He was nearly twelve when his grandad died and he had to be there even though he didn't want to. They made him go in and see the body, even though he didn't want to. He didn't know what you're meant to do when you go and look at someone's dead body, he felt stupid and awkward standing there with his hands shoved in the pockets of his new suit staring down at this withered little dead thing that used to laugh so loudly and take him to the football and tell Pip's dad to back off when he got too much. He wasn't upset, then, just curious and confused. Upset came later, hiding in his bedroom with everybody's coats while the rest of them crammed into the living room to drink beer and eat party food, crying desperately into his faded old West Ham pillowcase and clutching the knitted monkey Grandad George gave to him when he was a baby, thinking useless prayers and promises because he didn't know

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what else to do: bring him back and I'll never cry again, I'll never play my music too loud again, I'll never cheek my mum and dad again, I'll never I'll never I'll never-They stay up too late watching High School Musical DVDs and have takeaway pizza and jelly and ice-cream for dinner, after the girls promise not to tell their mum and Lindsay, but Pip doesn't really care either way. He's in enough trouble anyway, a bit more is just like a raindrop in the ocean. He leaves Melissa painting in the kitchen while he bathes the two little ones and gets them into pyjamas and into Lindsay's bed. When he comes back down, she's still working on the same canvas, concentrating hard with her tongue poked out. It makes him smile, because he does the same thing.

"Can I see?"

"If you want." She shows him, a grid of multicoloured squares with a different coloured shape in the middle of each, hearts and flowers and swirly things and stars. "It's rubbish. I'm rubbish at art."

"No you ain't. Nobody's rubbish at art, art's whatever you want it to be.

If you tipped all your paint out and squished it all together in a big brown splodge in the middle of your canvas and said it was art, I bet them wankers in the galleries in London'd fall all over each other to buy it off you."

She laughs and paints a yellow smiley face in the next green square.

"Help me finish it. You start in that bottom corner. Race me to the middle."

"Ain't fair, you've got a head start." He finds another brush anyway and joins in, little green leaves and blue fish and purple thumbprints.

"My dad was rubbish at art too," she says, after a little while, and Pip breathes in and out very slowly because he knew it was coming and knew he wasn't going to be ready for it when it did.

"Oh yeah?" he says lightly. He paints a pink heart and a white diamond.

"Yeah. He liked
looking
at it, but even when he just drew stickmen, even his stickmen looked like lepers."

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He sort of laughs, even though that's the last thing he feels like doing. "I dunno. Drawing a stickman who looks like a leper sounds like a good skill to me."

They meet just then, about two thirds of the way down the harlequin-chequered canvas, and both paint crooked stickmen, one acid green on black and one orange on purple, both with blood dripping out of severed limbs. It's a bit grotesque and inappropriate, he thinks suddenly, but it's too late now.

"And that's art, is it?" Melissa says critically.

"Only if you sign it." He loads his brush up with more of that bright green and gives it to her so she can write her name in careful block letters across the bottom, then he adds + PIP next to it in red. "
Now
it's art."

"Is it good enough to go on the wall?"

"It's going on the wall near the stairs so it's the first thing people see when they come in the front door." He means it, too. Of course Lindsay's going to bitch on and complain, but he's got a massive soft spot for Melissa that he refuses to admit to so he'll probably let it stay.

"I need a bath now," she says, picking at the rainbows on her hands. "I'm all painty. Can you come and talk to me?"

"Ain't allowed." He's only half-teasing. He gets up and starts washing brushes in the kitchen sink. "Ain't you starting to get boobs yet? I'll get put on a list."

"Yeah, but you're gay."

"Even

so."

"Please." She's been getting quieter while they've been painting. She's not even looking at him now, when he glances over his shoulder.

He ends up sitting on the floor with his back against the bath, flicking at bubbles that keep toppling off her Matey-mountain and drifting past his head.

They talk about telly for a bit, they talk about pop concerts her mum says she's not old enough to go to yet, they talk about whether putting High School Musical

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on ice is genius or retarded, but none of it really means anything. It's just building up and up, and he's not going to be the one to break the wave.

"Did you know my dad was a robber?" she says suddenly.

He hesitates, not sure what she's heard and how much she knows. She's smart, she's like him, she'll have picked up loads more than what she's been told, but he's still not sure what to say. "First time I went to your house," he says slowly, "and I was looking at all them paintings in one of the upstairs hallways, I kinda remembered in the news years ago when something got nicked and it looked like the same. But then I thought it was probably the same artist or a copy or something."

"Did you know he murdered people as well, though?"

It hits him like a punch in the stomach. "Where did you hear all this?"

"Me and Katie do school at home now because everybody at proper school kept saying stuff and whispering. Everybody knows. It's in the papers. He used to rob diamonds out the jewellery shops and when the police came to catch him he shot them, and Danny helped him."

"...Oh."

"My mum never knew anything, and my nan and everyone, nobody knew anything, they're all just walking round like ghosts. And you and Lindsay never knew either, did you?"

"No," he says. He's digging the nail of his forefinger so hard into the skin beside his thumbnail that it slips and makes it bleed.

"No. That's why Lindsay looks so sad all the time now, because his best friends were lying robbing murderers and nobody knew."

It's not right for eleven-year-old little girls to sound so tired and so bitter. He wants to turn round and drag her up out the bubbly water and hug her, but it'd be weird. Weird because she's got no clothes on, and weird because of everything she doesn't know, so he waits until the water's gone tepid and she's turned all wrinkly, he waits until she's in her pyjamas and he's combed her hair 413

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out and plaited it for her, and
then
he hugs her, in the bedroom with all the windows. She doesn't seem to want to let go, so he doesn't move anywhere, he just stays right there where he is until she's had enough and moves back on her own so he can tuck the covers in.

"I still miss him, though," she says, suddenly and quietly as he's heading for the door. "That's not right, is it?"

I wouldn't know
, he wants to say.
I don't give a fuck whether my dad
lives or dies
. Of course he doesn't say that. He fobs her off with something vague about how nothing's right or wrong and she's just got to feel what she feels and everybody else can go and fuck themselves – and then he goes downstairs to make himself up a bed on the sofa, but he can't sleep for hours and hours.

***

It's the nothingness that gets to him. Lindsay just wanders around in a daze – like Melissa said, like a ghost. He goes out on his own for hours, driving.

Sometimes he cooks food for both of them but they eat in separate rooms or at separate times. Sometimes he only cooks for himself and Pip has to go hunting through the cupboards later for something instant he can mix with boiling water or put in the microwave.

After a few weeks he starts really trying to get Lindsay to be angry with him. He breaks things on purpose but Lindsay just waits for him to clear them up, and does it himself when he won't. He puts red things in with white washes and dyes all Lindsay's shirts a dingy pink, but he only throws them out and goes shopping.

Finally, one Saturday evening, Pip goes into the living room and slaps Lindsay round the face really hard.

His head rockets back from the force of the slap, but that's the only way he reacts. He doesn't even put his hand on his cheek to hold down the sting, he

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just sits there and looks up at Pip. He doesn't look angry or shocked or anything, he's just staring.

"Have you quite finished?"

"If you hate me then
hate
me," Pip blurts out. It's as sudden as being sick; he didn't mean to speak, it just sort of happened. "Don't just act on like I ain't even here. You're allowed to hate me, fuck knows you've got every right, but can't you just really properly
hate
me?"

"You mean hit you."

"I-" His mind suddenly feels blank, like he's just lost all the words he knows. "Yeah, if you want. Not only. Shout. I dunno. Just... I don't know!
Do
something. Ain't you angry?"

"You're a fucking sociopath," Lindsay says, very calmly. He goes out driving again, even though it's getting dark, and Pip is asleep before he gets back.

***

When it finally happens, it's in the middle of the night and without many words. Pip is having a nightmare. He should be used to them by now, he used to get them all the time, but sleeping with somebody every night made them fade away. It's different now. It's like being back in the big house in London, how he used to wake up from bad dreams tangled in his covers and chewing on Mister Bollo's foot so he wouldn't wake anybody else up with his stupid crying – not that they'd ever hear him, the new house was so big and they were so far away, but when you're stuck in that strange place between asleep and awake and you don't really know where you are it's so easy for time to go all funny and warped.

When he was huddled there under the covers in the dark trying so hard to cry without making a noise if he had to be pathetic enough to cry at all, he always seemed to forget they weren't in the tiny flat any more and nobody was going to 415

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hear him and come thumping on the walls or storming into the room to yell at him for making noise. A bit useless, that, he always thought. They didn't like noise, so they shouted at him – or his dad whacked him one when he cried, like he honestly thought that was the best way to stop it and not make it worse.

The dream's gone as soon as he claws his way up to consciousness, he can't remember it. Something about a big wave coming too far up the beach, something about black clouds rolling in front of the sun, but he doesn't know why that was so scary, and now he's awake even those hazy little details are starting to disappear and there's nothing left except this dreadful feeling that he can't breathe and it's never going to be light again. His bed's right against the wall, he can scrabble up and pull the curtain open, but even the moon is dimmer than usual because it's stormy. That's the only light, up here on the hill. There's just black water as far as he can see, no streetlights or anything, just the fuzzy moon and some distant red blinking from the wind farm far out to sea down the coast. He wants to get up and put the light on but the lurching in his stomach when he even
thinks
about moving is so bad he feels like throwing up – and then he suddenly notices a presence in the room, standing just in front of the closed door, and for a second it's beyond throwing up and he can feel a chill travelling like a Mexican wave all over his skin.

"You were screaming in your sleep like a big girl."

Of course it's Lindsay. Who else would it be? Stupid nightmares, Pip thinks fiercely, stupid fucking head, stop it stop it
stop it
. He goes to speak, say sorry I woke you or oh fucking hell you gave me a fright lurking there like a creeper or something, he's not sure what, but he can't make a noise when he opens his mouth because the lump in his throat is in the way. He thinks if he could only remember what the horrible things in his dreams are he could find a way to talk himself out of finding them scary, like in Harry Potter, but he
can't
remember
. He curls back up, folding himself around his monkey and squeezing his eyes shut because the darkness isn't so scary if you make it dark on purpose, if you're in control of it yourself, and he waits for Lindsay to start having a go at him for making noise in the middle of the night when people are trying to sleep,